A short while ago Lee McCoy posted bout some keyword analysis he did on a site of his that shows just how long and thin the long thin tail of keywords is on one of his sites. 76% of the traffic came from search phrases that only delivered one visitor.

OK, I thought, well there’s another thing to worry about when optimising my sites, how one earth do I make use of this data?  So I had a poke about on an experimental affiliate site Skincare Brands.

As sites go it’s pretty thin affiliate stuff, loaded up with product feeds and hoping for the best, but I’ve worked hard to get the site fully indexed and with almost no backlinks or unique content I’ve managed to drum up 2,194 visits, almost all from Google search traffic from 1,942 keywords.

That seems like a reasonable amount of data to play with, so my next step is to create a check-list of phrases that I’m already indexed for, then to create some more optimised content and links to. In short I’m letting Google do my prioritisation for me.

So here’s what my tail looks like:

And here are the numbers:

(for the eagle eyed amongst you, there were 16 phrases reported as bringing NO visitors, if anyone can explain what that’s all about I’d love to know!)

So, here I am with a bunch of keywords bringing a few visitors that I can start to optimise for, but what of the 1768 keywords that brought only 1 visitor each? Is there gold in them there hills?

OK, so now comes the ‘clever’ bit. I copied out all the keyword tools into a text file and uploaded back to my website, then ran it through the Keyword density tool at SEOBook.com. This tool was originally for analysing the text of a page to make sure your copy had the right balance of keywords littered through it, but I’m using it to pick phrases out of a mass of keywords to find the popular ones.

What comes out is rather easier to digest than my original 2,000+ word list

I’m not going to publish the full results here, you can do that with your own sites, but here is a snippet that shows the value of these results, a handful of the 3 word phrases that occurred most often in the list.

loreal glam bronze    10 times
yves saint laurent    9 times
energetic turbo booster    9 times
garnier ultralift pro    8 times
acqua di parma    8 times

The interesting thing is that only one of these phrases has any relation to the top phrases overall, so while I might have missed “loreal glam bronze” in the main list I can now see it’s the ’stem’ of a lot of long tail phrases such as:

• loreal glam bronze for legs
• loreal glam bronze spray
• loreal glam bronze spray for legs
• cheap loreal glam bronze spray
• 150ml loreal glam bronze

What I have now is much better idea of what’s hidden in the long tail, a prioritised list of optimised pages to create for a range of 3-word terms that are worth chasing, and by going back to my long list I can even find the phrases to use in my copy that will give it variety and help me pin down exactly what people are looking for.